When interviewing Mrs. Flowers, I
was able to get a first hand look on what it takes to truly teach an English
Language Learner. She touched on a couple of different teaching models
including pull-out, full immersion, and co-teaching. To my
surprise, she felt like the best method was the full immersion method because
the students are completely immersed in the language. She actually has a
student that came to this school at the beginning of the year and spoke maybe
25% English. We have been in the school year now for about 6 weeks, and there
has obviously been a drastic amount of growth with this student. Although she
did not speak very much English, her parents wanted her to come to this school
and be in a fully immersed class because they too believed this was the best
way for their child to learn English. Mrs. Flowers stated in the interview that
in order to differentiate for the student, she uses sentence stems very often
and uses a lot of dialogue as well. She wants the students to have the
opportunity to speak and converse often in order to build their academic
vocabulary. She also stated that she believes that many of the strategies that
are used for English Language Learners are also very beneficial to all other
students. I never really thought about the use of those same strategies for
English-speaking students, but it is obvious that those same techniques are
necessary for some other students who may not be as quick as others to learn
certain things.
